Immigration and Migration to Holyoke
"…we all are in this strange country": Immigration and Migration to Holyoke
There is an early and continuing importance of immigration and migration to Holyoke. By the 1880s, Holyoke, known as The Paper City, was a booming industrial center. Immigrants from Europe and Canada and migrants from Puerto Rico came to work and made the city their home. As each group of people arrived - Irish, French Canadians, Italians, Germans, Poles and Puerto Ricans - an adjustment resulted as newcomers joined the competition for jobs and housing. Holyoke's history holds a powerful story of the development of a mill town into a booming industry. It is also a story of the immigrants and migrants who contributed to a fluid and complex set of new and established cultural patterns. Their impact on the social and cultural identity of the community is reflected in Holyoke today. This exhibit examines the reasons people emigrated from Ireland, Canada, Poland, Italy, Germany and Puerto Rico to Holyoke, Massachusetts. It also features an introduction to ethnic enclaves created when immigrants and migrants moved into the city. Finally, the exhibit addresses some struggles and stereotypes as seen in Holyoke, past and present.
Change came in the 1840s as settlers moved in and New England’s roads developed. In 1847, a group of investors from Boston purchased land in Ireland Parish and built a canal system that would provide power for dozens of mills. Before Holyoke was incorporated as a city in 1873, Ireland Parish had a cotton mill, a grist mill, a tannery, a clock maker, a quarry, two physicians, a shoemaker, tailor, wheelwright, painter, blacksmith, one school, two churches and a well known but modest tavern.
Immigrants arriving through Ellis Island were carefully tagged with their names and the steamship upon which they arrived. Some of the immigrants to Holyoke in this photo still have tags hanging from them.
By 1870, Holyoke was no longer the agricultural village it had been earlier. The population had increased from 3,245 to 10,733 and it was well on its way to becoming the Paper City. Eleven paper mills employed more than 1,000 workers producing tissue, books, forms and the fine white writing paper that would make the city famous.
Boston Associates established the Hadley Falls Company and built a wooden dam on the Connecticut River. On November 16, 1848 at 10 am, the gates were closed and the water began to rise. At 3:26 pm, the dam was swept away to the famous words “Dam gone to hell by way of Willimansett.” A second wooden dam made with an apron for support, was built in 1849. In 1858, the Holyoke Water Power Company took control of Hadley Falls Company. Holyoke Water Power Company, employing mainly Irish immigrants, began construction on a new and stronger stone dam in the 1890s and finished in 1900. At the same time, mills were being built all around Holyoke.
Irish day laborers provided the first immigrant work force in Holyoke, having arrived in 1847 to dig the canals and construct the new dam and mill buildings. When the cotton mills became operative, many of the laborers and their families stayed in Holyoke and took unskilled jobs in the mills. Of the several hundred first employed in the mills, at least half were Irish, while the remainder were recruited from Ireland Parish and surrounding towns.
The Irish began immigrating to America during the 1820s and by the 1850s the number had grown to almost one million. In addition to the potato famine of 1846, the Irish left their native land for other important reasons. Some were seeking religious freedom and escaped the exploitation of British rule, which included tax collectors and the enforced payment of tithe to a church in whose doctrine they did not believe. Immigrants came from Connaught, County Mayo and County Clare, Dublin, Cork and Kerry counties in Ireland. Pictured here is the McCarthy Family.
After the Irish, the second largest immigrant group into Holyoke was French Canadians, most of whom came from the 1870s to the 1880s. The population in Canada had increased to where cultivatable land could not support the population. Also, American manufacturers paid more than their Canadian counterparts. Early French Canadian immigrants sent back enthusiastic accounts of America along with more money than their families had ever seen.
The Holyoke Transcript Telegram of April 5, 1873 reported:
“Frenchmen are coming into town ‘thicker and faster and more of ‘em’ according to the officer stationed at the Connecticut Railroad depot who said there were fresh arrivals with every train.”
German families came to Holyoke in the 1860s. They were textile workers from Rhineland and Saxony, highly trained in hand weaving and experienced in making woolens for the German market. With the increasing use of machines to produce woolens in Germany, they sought opportunity for their skills in America. Although represented by only a handful of their countrymen in the 1850s, the flow of German immigrants rapidly increased after 1865. August and Hermann Stursberg, owners of woolen mills in Germany, bought half interest in the Germania Mills. German spinners and weavers found an easy niche in Holyoke because the Stursberg brothers brought them to work and Germans began making a community in South Holyoke.
The first Italians came to Holyoke in the late 1880s. Italians established confectionary and fruit stores between 1882 and 1900. The shops were owned by Rigali, Musante, Campagna, Buglia, Equi, Luchini, Marano. Most stores were on High or Main Street. Frank J. Equi, pictured above in front of his coffee and sandwich shop, on Main Street, was in the business for 80 years. He began working at the shop with his father when he was 16 years old. In 1975, he sold the business to Bernard Cawley of Feeding Hills to continue the restaurant business.
Polish immigration began after the close of the Civil War and the end of the 1863 Polish Revolt for independence. Among the first of the Polish settlers were Czarnecki, Zielinski, Symasko, Szewczynski, Niedzielski, Rutka, Jurasz, Dusza, Swiatek, Slajda, Frodyma. Polish immigrants to Holyoke were mainly young adults, either unmarried or with children too young to work. The one sure place Polish immigrants could find work was the Lyman Mills.
Portuguese immigrants first arrived in Holyoke in the early 1900s, drawn by the work in the textile mills, and at times, to escape an oppressive military draft law in Portugal. Some worked at Mackintosh and Sons Company, Farr Alpaca and at the American Thread Company.
By 1941, the streets downtown were full of first, second or third generation immigrants. Anita Marcotte Healy, French Canadian, remembers that “Main Street was a hustle and bustle place with a good ethnic mixture of businesses- there was a Greek, a Jew, French and Polish. The Irish were mostly up the hill and the Germans on Park Street.” (Photograph taken by John Collier, 1941; courtesy of the Office of War Information, Library of Congress)
Puerto Ricans are Holyoke’s most recent group to enter Holyoke, beginning in the late 1950s. Unlike earlier immigrant groups which came to Holyoke during periods of expanding population and economy, Puerto Ricans migrated to Holyoke when the existing population was decreasing and industrial jobs were harder to find. (Photo taken by Bill Ravanesi)
The company tenements were models for their day. The Holyoke Transcript described a block in South Holyoke as “having a handsome front of pressed brick, double circular windows, three stories high with French roof, and twenty-eight rooms with a dining room, pantries, a kitchen, with most of the rooms finished in oak graining…”
As more immigrants and migrants flooded into Holyoke, the town became a city and industries were popping up all over Holyoke.